PEACE, MAYBE: President Donald Trump announced yesterday that he will meet Russian President Vladimir Putin on August 15th in Alaska to negotiate an end to the war in Ukraine.

  Trump said a deal could include “some swapping of territories” … Ukraine ceding land to Moscow, which Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky flatly rejected.  “Ukrainians will not give their land to the occupier,”  Zelensky said in a video address even as Russian forces continue to slowly cut into his country.  “Any decisions made against us, any decisions made without Ukraine, are at the same time decisions against peace,” Zelensky said. “They will bring nothing. These are dead decisions; they will never work.”

THE MESS WITH TEXAS: Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton announced a lawsuit before the state Supreme Court to remove some of the lawmakers who left the state to break the quorum Republicans need for voting on favorable redrawing of congressional districts.

  The Texas house failed again yesterday to meet with a quorum.

  The Republicans intend to vote on a new congressional district map that would virtually guarantee them five more seats in the US House after the 2026 mid-terms. The new map breaks up some Democratic strongholds and salts their votes into Republican districts. 

  Rarely has the drawing of districts for political advantage known as “gerrymandering” been so brazen. The proposed 11^th District, for instance, has a rat-like tail in Democratic Austin attached to a 300-mile Republican body to the west. 

  District 32 takes a chunk of Democratic Dallas and attaches it to a wide open stretch of Republican territory to the east.

THE WAR ROOM:  Explosions rocked Gaza city yesterday only hours after the Israeli war cabinet voted to take Gaza’s largest city, resulting in full military control of the Gaza strip.

  Even before those explosions, Israeli protesters hit the streets saying this escalation further endangers the lives of the remaining hostages held by Hamas in Gaza for more than a year and a half.

   Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office said the security cabinet adopted “five principles for concluding the war,” including disarming Hamas, freeing hostages, demilitarizing Gaza, establishing military control, and setting up “an alternative civilian administration that is neither Hamas nor the Palestinian Authority.”

   Deaths have surpassed 60,000 in Gaza and residents are starving as even the insufficient  food aid shipped in fails to get through to the population.

REGIME NEWS:

— President Trump removed IRS Commissioner Billy Long just two months after he was confirmed to office. No explanation was given. Long is a former auctioneer and Republican congressman who used to say the IRS should be abolished.

  Long said on social media that he would be nominated to become the next US ambassador to Iceland. Greece was taken by Donald Trump Jr.’s former fiancée.

— The Pentagon plans to restore to its original place a Confederate statue that was removed from Arlington National Cemetery on the recommendation of Congress. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said on social media that the statue “never should have been taken down by woke lemmings.”

— The Smithsonian Museum restored mention of Donald Trump in its “Impeachment” exhibit but rewrote the previously blunt language about Trump’s “repeated ‘false statements’ challenging the 2020 election results” and his delivery of the speech that “encouraged — and foreseeably resulted in — imminent lawless action at the Capitol.”

THE SHOOTING GALLERY: The gunman and a police officer died yesterday in a shooting outside the Centers for Disease Control near the Emory University campus in Atlanta.

  Bullets peppered the CDC building and one police car was riddled with holes. The shooting started at a CVS drugstore and the gunman was found dead on the second floor. It had not been determined whether he was killed by the police or by his own hand.

  The dead officer was from the DeKalb County Police Department.

  In Montana, an Army veteran wanted for the killing of four people at a bar in the town of Anaconda, was taken into custody yesterday after an eight-day manhunt. He was still armed. A bartender and three customers were killed in the shooting. 

PLAY BALL: Jen Pawol, 48, a minor league baseball umpire, has been called to  the plate today to become the first woman Major League umpire. “I’m aware of the magnitude,” she said.

THE OBIT PAGE: James A. Lovell Jr., the commander of the three-man Apollo 13 spacecraft that survived an onboard explosion in April 1970 and was brought back to Earth in a remote rescue operation that had the country on the edge of its seat, died in Lake Forest, Illinois. He was 97.

  The drama was the subject of the 1995 Tom Hanks movie, “Apollo 13” in which the actor delivered the now famous phrase, “Houston, we have a problem.” What Lovell actually said was the less catchy or immediate, “Houston, we’ve had a problem.”

  The explosion blew out one oxygen tank and damaged the second, but the spacecraft was able to do a slingshot move around the earth, return, and splash down in the Pacific. Lovell had flown 715 hours in three space programs and never made it to the moon.

BELOW THE FOLD: Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem is on a tear about her portrayal in the animated comedy series South Park  in which she’s shown appearing at ICE raids in body armor and armed with a pistol that she uses  to shoot every dog she sees … a reference to once having shot her own dog.

  But Noem is incensed at the portrayal of her surgically enhanced looks. The face on her cartoon character occasionally melts and then she’s surround by a gaggle of aides and makeup artists who put her back together.

  Noem said on Glenn Beck’s podcast that, “It’s so lazy to make fun of women for how they look.” Okay, but what they’re making fun of is how she got her looks.